| Crochet Graphing by Linda Gelb |
| Hello, my name is Linda Gelb. Most know me as diznemom. I am married to my highschool sweetheart, 35 years. I have 3 children, 2 boys that are married and 1 daughter engaged. My oldest son has given me 2 wonderful granddaughters and another grandchild due in August. All are out of my house so I now can devote full time to my favorite craft-crochet. Husband is an over the road tractor trailer driver so he is not home much. I work full-time for the county in the welfare system. I started doing graph afghan about 5 years ago. I did my first in single crochet (Telletubbies) and said never again. It was so complicated for me to figure out which was the right side and which was the wrong. All mine are now done in the afghan/tunisian stitch. I can't remember how to do the color changes in sc any longer. I had done the basic afghan stitch many years ago. I just had to remember how to do it and then learn how to do colour changes. The site that helped me was www.crochetcabana.com. I followed the directions for color change and from there I was on a roll. I joined the MoEZ group at Yahoo. I am now a moderator of that group. Most of my graphs that I use come from the wonderful graphers in the group and some from what I find on the internet. I had problems working directly from the graphs. I found it hard to follow the small squares and keep track of where I was on the graph. This was how the Row Counts came to be. A row count is a graph written out. It tells how many stitches and colours for each row. Almost all the counts are written for the afghan/tunisian stitch but can be converted to sc by reversing every other row. I now have 2 websites: Angelfire - http://www.tinyurl.com/o4fj Geocities - http://www.tinyurl.com/04fm These are mirror sites of each other. That way if one is not working you can access the other. I have a fantastic webdesigner, Cheryl, that does the websites for me. I started out very small on Geocities with their templates and Cheryl took over and has expanded it way beyond my wildest dreams. I don't know html. I do a lot of these graph ghans for various charities. Just recently I have done a Fireman Quilt for a local firehouse. They made over $500.00 in the raffle for this. I have a Police Quilt that I am now checking to see which police department will take it for a fundraiser. I have helped a lot of crocheters learn the colour changes. Sometimes by email and other times we meet in a chat room or on AIM and once I "talk" them through it they are amazed how easy it is. I am constantly receiving emails from visitors to the websites. Some have even traveled up to visit me to meet and learn how to do the graph ghans. It thrills me to know I have helped others do this type of crocheting. Next month I will have a simple graph and instructions on how to do it in the afghan stitch with colour changes. Stay tuned. |